distSim is a research project to construct a general purpose
distributed simulation environment. Attempting to answer the
question, "How to quickly and cost effectively, create an accurate
simulation if you aren't a programmer." Specifically, we have
biologists in mind for an early target audience. Please note, we are
in the early stages of design, and some of the project specific
terminology is not yet finalized.

The simulation consists of an environment, and models. Models exist
in the environment. The environment provides rules for how the models
co-exist, and a customizable ruleset. The environment will provide
for things like the gravitational constant, ambient air temperature,
etc.... Essentially, anything which affects all the models in a
geographic area.

Models are what need to get written for a new simulation. The
programmer will need to become familiar with the model API only. We
intend to ultimately provide bindings for several languages, but will
start with C and C++. The biologists will interact with a library of
already developed models when the software is mature.

Parallelism will principally be provided by assigning 'geographic'
boundaries, which overlap with network boundaries. That is to say,
within the simulation tile sets A and B are congruent, but exist on
separate machines. How these to sets interact will likely be the
topic of our first paper, but the biologists probably won't care.

It's finals week here at UCO. The project went through a successfull proof of concept, but we're now working on a mechanism by which to copy GObjects between MPI Tasks. I've been working on that for a couple of weeks, and am making good headway. The GObject code is found in ./gobject_move_test